Some of you might remeber the first version of this game that was made for Java 4K 2005. The current version is populated with 10 demo/test levels. Gamepad support is through JInput2. Everything seems to work and the testers so far have already set some impressive times!

Very cool game. It ran at about 40 FPS on average until I got to the level with the laser trip wire thingys than it ran about 15 FPS from then on. I have a very slow CPU by the way (400Mhz), that's why.

Well, as I said... add a broad collision phase (even a really crude one will do the trick). That should boost the performance quite a lot (especially with weak CPUs)

Like creating a grid (with dunno... ball size squares). For each cell you can have some array (or similar) will all entities, which are sorta kinda inside this cell. And then simply collide with all things in those cells which intersect* the moving rect (dont worry about checking the same thing seval times**) and then look for collisions with moving entities.

[* by that I obviously mean that one has to figure out the start and stop values for those two for loops][** any book-keeping wouldnt be worth the trouble in this case... well feel free to add tagging... like do these two for loops twice and set a flag on the first pass, but its unlikely that it will make a difference in this case]

In most cases there will be only a handful of collision checks per frame and it scales reasonable well. Since the speed of the ball is rather slow you can do it like this. If it would move faster the moving rect would be a bad idea, because it would contain too many uninteresting cells and you would have to use ray casting then.

Game pad is broken. The configuration asks me to move the stick to the left and up.. and guess which directions I can't tilt in thegame? I can't tilt "down" or "right". Makes things hard . Maybe you aren't allowing negative values or something?

Game pad is broken. The configuration asks me to move the stick to the left and up.. and guess which directions I can't tilt in thegame? I can't tilt "down" or "right". Makes things hard Smiley. Maybe you aren't allowing negative values or something?

Ooops, wierd. Gamepad has worked on all platforms for different people (so I think I have negative values covered ) - guess theres something odd going on here. Its JInput2 - so I'm well open to finding issues What platform are you using?

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cool game as usual kev, but I never got above 20FPS! the "new dawn games" took over a minute to finish playing!

WinXP // 512MB // 2.19GHz AMD 3200+ // nVidia GeForce4 MX (64MB vram)

I dont think its my card because most other games (including yours) run at 60fps without a sweat

Eeeep, you should be getting 100's of fps on that config - I guess its a timing issue. Is the 3200 thinger a dual core or something odd like that. You played it once before was it a problem then?

With a different mouse and different OS (Linux) I was able to control it a bit better and finished all the levels with a gold star. yay for me.

I think it would be better if the ball remained in the center of the screen and the level shifted around underneath it.. or maybe a combination of that and how it is now... I find it harder to control when the ball is near the edges ofthe screen. I suspect it is because of the shift in perspective.

cool game as usual kev, but I never got above 20FPS! the "new dawn games" took over a minute to finish playing!

WinXP // 512MB // 2.19GHz AMD 3200+ // nVidia GeForce4 MX (64MB vram)

I dont think its my card because most other games (including yours) run at 60fps without a sweat

Eeeep, you should be getting 100's of fps on that config - I guess its a timing issue. Is the 3200 thinger a dual core or something odd like that. You played it once before was it a problem then?

AMD Athlon 3200+ is not dual core AFAIK (although the AMD64 one is)

when I played the earlier version before I didnt see an FPS counter and the "new dawn" intro wasnt there either.. so I'm not sure if there was any FPS difference. both versions are insanely easy if that hints you to anything. the board responds slowly and the game is very easy due to how slow the ball is moving.

basically it takes rougly 6 or 7 seconds (in real time) to go from the top of the board in level 1 to the bottom of the board. also, the in-game timer at the top is about 5 seconds realtime per 1 second gametime.

Tile based collision simply wouldn't work here, the physics wouldn't allow it. Without precise collision nothing will work correct.

However, as Onyx suggests above, a broad collision sweep initially might help alot (although profiling tells me that isn't a bottle neck). Incidently, a tile based system over the current system would improve CPU usage but would increase RAM usage - not that RAM seems to be much of a problem given the size of the levels.

Woogley - could you try it again and let me know the details of the renderer being used from the log file

TAK - cheers. I actually chose the background intentionally for its calming properties due to the infuriating nature of the game. Level are (as noted above) just feature tests right now - so all of them are way way too hard.

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